A Minister Mother Muses About Sunday School

I always wonder about the appropriateness of bugging my own children to come to church on Sunday morning. After all, I’m the minister there and I suppose it looks good to have my own children attending if I expect others to do the same. Then again, I suppose that’s self-serving — it shouldn’t be about my job, should it?

Well, besides being a parish minister with the concerns of my professional persona, I am also a mother. I am a mother who cares deeply for her children, as I know do most UU parents of UU children. In that role, I take seriously my children’s religious and spiritual development, just as seriously, in fact, as I take their academic and social development.

My kids seem to be the typical American kids, teens at this point. I have a boy who is a senior this year, another who is a freshman, and a daughter in middle-school. They are all happy and active. Many times on Sunday mornings they wake up and as I struggle to get us dressed appropriately and all out the door, they complain and tell me they don’t want to go. “I’m too tired mom; I was out late last night,” or, “I’ll just stay here today and clean up the kitchen and do my homework,” or, “church is dumb, those boys drive me crazy.” Sympathetic mother that I am, I nod understandingly (and hopefully, when I imagine coming home to a clean kitchen) and remember that I had liberal UU parents who listened to me when I said I didn’t want to go to church that morning. What ended up happening in my youth is that the whole family stopped going to church altogether.

I missed the experience of being a UU youth, of 15 years of Unitarian Universalism, since I didn’t really go back until I had my own children. My mother went back too.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if I were that open-minded about my children’s attendance in public school or participation at the dinner table or household responsibilities? Yes, I said above I believe in their academic, social and athletic development, and their spiritual and religious development. I am their parent — I make them come to church. When they are 18, they can decide for themselves what they want to do about school, about religion. I hope they choose to continue in both, but if I give them a good start, there’s a good chance that they will.

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